Customer service centers (also known as call centers) handle large loads of communications from a variety of sources. To more effectively handle these communications, efforts to improve efficiency often center on the performance of customer service agents as they deal with these communications. Along with other performance metrics, these efforts may include collecting biometric measurements from agents during their handling of communications, such as blood pressure and heart rate.
However, biometric measurements are often difficult to collect during an agent's handling of communications. The collection of biometric measurements itself may interfere with the agents' work and decrease performance levels. Furthermore, the use of biometric measurements is generally limited to tracking basic stress levels via limited measurements such as blood pressure and heart rate in existing efficiency improvement systems. Another problem with the collection of biometric measurements is that correlations between biometric measurements and agent performance are not well understood.
Furthermore, recent advances in psychophysiological studies have pointed to methods to objectively measure empathy levels of individuals. Agents who are perceived to be “empathetic” often receive higher performance scores. However, biometric measurements are not correlated to an empathy level in existing efficiency improvement systems.
Accordingly, needs exist to collect more types of biometric measurements from agents, correlate biometric measurements to performance, and use this correlation to increase the performance and/or health of agents.